The police confirmed that four coffins had been removed from their graves and bones had been thrown on the grounds.

 

A man made the gruesome discovery on September 13, some days prior to the holiday of  Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year. He had paid visit to the Dieweg cemetery in Uccle, in the hopes of finding one of his ancestors there.

 

Instead, he fell on the smashed grave stones, and coffins removed from their plots. Some bones had even been scattered around the grounds.

 

The vault in question contained 19th and 20th century gravestones, making it difficult to identify the skeletons, given the age of the graves.

 

The perpetrators have still not been identified. No one has entered the vault since the last routine security check dating back to October 2011.

 

Dieweg is home to one of the most ancient Jewish cemeteries in Brussels. No graffiti or engraving was discovered in the surrounding area to the vault.

 

According to Eric Sax, a registry office official in Uccle, “it is not been treated as an anti-Semitic act”.

 

“The perpetrators were surely looking for jewellery. In any case, there was no trace, no mark, and no racist etching. I think therefore that it was purely and simply theft,” he said. “We have made contact with the Jewish Consistory and we have shown them the entrance to the cemetery. We then asked them to restore the entrance and to secure it. Unfortunately, their response was that they don’t for the moments have the means with which to do the work.”

 

Source: EJPress